Tuesday, 7 July 2015

How The Birds Changed Their Feathers

My picture book HOW THE BIRDS CHANGED THEIR FEATHERS was first published in 1976. It was commended for the CILIP Kate Greenaway medal that same year. This book has always been one of my favourites, so I was very upset to learn that the publisher had lost the artwork during an office move. I did however still have two spreads which I had borrowed for a talk I was giving in a Glasgow children's library. So using these and the printed book as reference, I decided last year to re-do the artwork in order to publish the book on the iBook store. I could have simply scanned the printed book, but the quality of the colour and the definition would not have been good enough, so I traced my designs onto tracing paper and then using a light box, transferred them onto water colour paper. The finished coloured illustrations took me longer than they did forty years ago, but I have finally published the book as an ebook on the iBooks Store. You can find it here:How The Birds Changed Their Feathers